Postmortem: Materiality, Partiality, and Incompleteness

When I set out to make Hollow Machines I had a really clear idea of what I wanted it to be. Following on the principles of Affinity, I wanted to make a little game featuring wonderful photos of armour from the MET that didn't rely on stat sheets, but rather treated each suit of armour as a unique node in a contoured, dynamic space.

I picked the photos I wanted and then wrote the first page. It has remained largely unchanged from my original draft, apart from some tweaks in phrasing. The difficulty came in the implementation of what I had written.

I specifically didn't want Hollow Machines to be about characters, but rather about the concrete, material posititionality of each suit of armour, which is to say, the ways in which each suit of armour expresses its unique spacing or situation through its design and construction. However, I was quickly derailed by character, bewitched by the completeness of the armour that I had chosen. My first draft of the armour sheets had twice as many complete suits of armour, and each had probably twice as many conditions or modulations attached to it. But the problem was, most of what I had written was character work. I almost completely lost touch with the materiality of each suit of armour, and was instead writing nameless back stories for them. I was maybe two thirds done and feeling myself losing steam when I realized what was going on.

So I started over. Not completely—I kept my first page, because I knew that that was the vision I was working toward, but I scrapped the rest. I narrowed my focus to just four suits of armour and I adjusted the central card-drawing mechanic (originally, each player would have had their own deck with unique patrons, which would have been cool, but was still too character-focused for what I was trying to accomplish). I tried my best to stay focused on the armour itself and not the person inside it. I wanted each armour to be the expression of a social, cultural, and historical position, and not of some notion of an essential personhood.

I think I got maybe halfway there.

This is why I call Hollow Machines semi-complete in the description. It's not a perfect realization of the principles I set forward. But I think it's on the way.

In her Cyborg Manifesto, the primary inspiration for my Affinity plugin, Donna Haraway is concerned, in part, with "contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes" (5), and labours throughout the manifesto to challenge those "seductions to organic wholeness" that operate "through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity" (8). These words came to mind as I was reflecting on the development of Hollow Machines, and I think they are illuminating.

The completeness of the suits of armour I had chosen seduced me into the "organic wholeness" of explanation and backstory, covering over the reality that personhood is a process emerging from "permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints" (15). If I decide to extend or adapt Hollow Machines in the future, I need to start from the pieces, from the incomplete parts, in all of their radical specificity, because in the potency of their particularity, the plurality of their possibilities, they exceed any totalizing whole I might try to establish. This is not to deny character or personhood, nor is it to repudiate backstory. Rather, this is about recognizing the messiness and ongoingness of identity, the fundamental openness that is the birth and the engine of each and every saying of the 'I.'

I hope you can have fun with Hollow Machines. And I hope you can go beyond it as soon as you touch it, as soon as you use its tools to speak yourself into play.

* All citations from Haraway are from the physical version included in Manifestly Haraway (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp. 3-90, but a free pdf is available online here: https://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Haraway-CyborgManifesto-1.pdf.